Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from C ...

In relating the historical contextualization of online discourse to a sociological analysis of Internet usage, this book calls for a rethinking of assumptions about virtual communities, cyberspace, and practices of Internet use. Finally, this book contributes to debates about Bourdieu’s concepts of field, class, and capital, and the theory of the state.

Of all the grand narratives that suffuse the space of public and private life in contemporary India, none is as visible and manifest as the discourse of the nation and nationalism. That discourse, no doubt, is deeply contested; it occurs as an amalgam of competing secular, secessionist, and majoritarian claims about the Indian state and people. Nonetheless, the idea of the nation, whatever its many and contested meanings, is ubiquitous in Indian social space. It is found in political slogans on billboards and on the sides of buses; in the coverage of the Indian cricket team; in the stories and melodies of the Hindi film industry; in the offerings of the Indian advertising industry; in the speeches of the muezzin, pandit, and priest declaimed from mosque, temple, and church; in the bodily practices of members of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; and in the wars between Indian mafia gangs from Mumbai to Uttar Pradesh.

Perhaps only marginally less prominent in Indian social space, especially in the present historical context, is the discourse of technology. In the nation’s metros and small towns, the idea of technology is all-pervasive, although, ironically, a significant proportion of the population in India does not have access to the benefits and conveniences of technology. The pervasiveness of technology can be seen in the cybercafés that keep proliferating across Indian cities, in the mushrooming of dozens of private educational institutions that offer short-term diplomas in IT and computing skills, in advertisements that lure students with a promise that they will get jobs as software programmers in America, and in the media stories that sing the glories of Indian technological achievements. Less visible but no less tangible evidence of the pervasiveness of the discourse can be found in the aspiration of hundreds of thousands of high school students to obtain a seat in one of India’s premier technology institutes.